Olivia Laing's first book, To The River, was called both "erudite and wacky", its author acclaimed for the beauty of her prose and compared to WG Sebald and Richard Mabey. It was certainly an idiosyncratic work – a homage to the Sussex Ouse and to Virginia Woolf who walked into it to an untimely death in 1941. Laing is evidently fascinated by rivers, and in The Trip to Echo Spring she is following not one but several - this time rivers of alcohol, hoping to discover their effects on certain writers and their creations.
Reported by Independent 16 hours ago.
↧